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One of the reviewers of this topic commented that he read the Lesson 1 six
times, wondering how this was possible. I told him the story of what one
CMMI lead appraiser, who had actually worked with Watts Humphrey
developing the material that led to the original CMM model, told me. He
had impressed upon me the power of SP 1.1 of OPF by stating that the
developers of the model knew that different businesses had different
process needs because of the nature of their product and customers. By
spending time to capture your true business needs, you can provide a con-
text to make decisions about where to focus your priorities. Today, many
organizations in search of a CMMI Maturity level 3 just go out and imple-
ment every specific practice in every level 2 and level 3 process area, and
don't think about how much effort they should be investing in each area
first. If you have created a good, documented process needs description,
you can use that to explain why you might decide to focus more on one
area rather than another. Unfortunately, many organizations don't know
they have these options at their disposal to make intelligent decisions
related to how they focus their effort based on their business needs.
2.7 Aligning Process Descriptions and Training with the
Real Process
Through the presentations and the discussions initiated by the VP, people in
the organization became increasingly aware that the company achieved
great value through product reuse. But as this discussion evolved, people
began to realize that many of the company processes had been written solely
for new development. This included the systems engineering requirements
and design processes. Further discussions occurred on the relationship
between design and product reuse, and the reuse of requirements. Because of
these discussions, specific process improvement initiatives were identified
and approved to better align systems engineering processes and training in
the company with its reuse-centric approach.
The discussions initiated by the VP also led to an increasing awareness of the
need for more rapid response to changing customer needs. Further questions
and discussions on where current processes were failing led interestingly to
human resources and personnel turnover in the company.
The driving force behind these discussions related to experiences at the com-
pany the year before initiating the CMMI effort. In 2007, LACM had
experienced a large number of technical resignations, which in turn had
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